Passwords don't have to be hard to remember. Go long, and you'll even make it nigh unhackable.

Secure passwords are a nightmare. To date, most people have been taught to come up with bizarre combinations of letters, numbers and symbols to keep their information safe. This also means that most people also stick to the old idea that you just need to make a password eight characters long, and you'll be in the clear.

But these days, a typical desktop PC can test every combination of eight-character password in just 13 minutes!

So throw out that old X93$-Fr7a and get with the new school of thought that is much easier to remember.

By making your password long, you make it much more secure, and you can also find better ways to make it easy to remember. Think of a couple of words that you will never forget. Not names or personal references. Something that amuses you, something fun or something you like that isn't obvious. And make sure the words have nothing to do with each other. Like FlowerpotBaseball or SolarMeltHamster.

Give each word a capital letter, and stick a symbol or number between the words and at the end. For a computer to crack Flowerpot-Baseball99, which is 20 characters long, it would take so long that the Earth will have been engulfed by the sun before it's finished. But it's easy to remember!

Play with the theory by using 3 or more shorter words, or putting symbols or numbers in different places. Don't be too formulaic in your thinking. Just make it long, and make it weird, and you're heading in the right direction towards keeping your secure stuff secure for a lot longer.